Surprising no one, Samsung's biggest concern was slowing down Apple's rapid growth. With iPhone unit sales numbers increasing by tens of millions each year, Samsung wrote that "future success is dependent on blunting Apple."

Samsung didn't see HTC and other Android device manufacturers as allies. The documents note HTC's success at launching on major carriers simultaneously, providing a consistent look and feel across its range of devices, and building "carrier friendly, good enough" phones.

Samsung noted that its biggest internal problems were a weak brand and low quality. To emphasize these points, the documents note that carriers were more than three times as likely to refer customers to an Apple device than to a Galaxy phone and that there were more than 30 delayed Samsung product launches in 2011 alone.

While Samsung's Galaxy phones rose to prominence thanks to the Android ecosystem, the company has been planning for years to ditch the platform for its own operating system as soon as it can.

That last point could have an incredible impact on the smartphone market. Samsung sells more devices and makes more profit than anyone else in the Android space — if any one company could develop a competitor to Android and iOS, Samsung would be the company with the resources and sales volume to do it.

So far, Samsung has only brought its open-source Tizen operating system to prototypes and smartwatches. It'll be interesting to see whether the South Korean giant actually tries to take on Google in the years to come. The biggest hurdle the company would need to overcome is app availability: So far, users seem to be wary of moving to new platforms with more limited selections of apps than what they can get on iOS and Android today.